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| Prepping for College: Items for both Kids and Parents 2010 update: our last child is now waiting to hear back from colleges on the west coast. Later this spring, I'll update our tips that we learned this second time around. Spring Update: We were much more on our own for the last kid; but learned much from the first time around. We also did a lot more campus visits in advance and one big new approach was taking advantage of the ability for our daughter to spend the night at the school in a dorm and go to a class. This helped her focus on what the schools were like from the inside. Obviously who she was assigned to be with made an impact, but still a great way to better see the schools from the inside out. JUNE 2010 UPDATE: It is final. Jenna got into over half of the schools she applied to and in the end picked sunny California and the University of Redlands. --------------------------------------------------------------- Gavin is in the last stages of his high school senior college search which was much more demanding than anyone had predicted. And the competition this year was much more intense. All the details can be found by asking him or his parents, but of public interest are several helpful checklists that Les has come across. GAVIN UPDATE: Gavin is now a Trojan at USC. College Dorm Checklists Also, here are some web sites of varying interest: The first one is free and has a variety of tips and discussions about getting into college and ideas about various schools: College Confidential. There is a lot of specific info about individual colleges and university. While this is the Internet and you can't believe everything you read, we did find this to be an interesting unfiltered view of the application prep process and info about the schools. Another is a pay site, but filled with some nice "inside" info: College Prowler. While you don't want to put too much weight on ranking lists, the most famous one is US World and News. This is another pay site, but we did find it interesting and helpful at a high level to see the larger picture. We found a "cheap" way to do the college tour was to purchase the DVD tour of major colleges around the US. Each school has about a 15 minute tour to give you the low down. Here is an Amazon.com link for the DVD set. Gavin and Les still went on a road trip (9 colleges from east to west coast in 7 days), but the DVD tours helped narrow down the list. Finally some links to recent articles on the difficulty of the 2007 acceptance year. It was competitive! The New York Times general education web site. New York Times: High Anxiety of Getting Into College
A HIGH school senior was fighting back tears in her guidance counselor’s office. Despite her 92 average, the girl had been rejected by her top three college choices. Another senior, already clad in a new Northwestern T-shirt, interrupted to give his counselor a thumbs-up. He was in.
And so it has gone over the last few weeks, as colleges send their decisions and counselors console, cheer up and otherwise try to help this year’s seniors navigate the end of the admissions process.
“It’s a bittersweet time,” said Susan Buchman, a counselor at Byram Hills High School in Armonk. “You get some kids who are ecstatic because they got into their first choice school, and then there are disappointments. And you get parents who are very upset. They were hoping their kid was going to get into a certain school so that they could put the sticker on the car.”
Ms. Buchman tries to explain to families that the second- or third-choice college is also a wonderful place, that the child will make friends, get a good education and life will go on. In six months, that first choice will be a vague memory.
But given all the angst surrounding college admissions, it can be a difficult message to sell. Emotions run high this season, and the anxiety level is testament to a process that many educators believe has spiraled out of control.
New York Times on how competitive it is-covers girls, but interesting to all: For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn't measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight. ''First of all, I'm a terrible athlete,'' . . .
Wall Street Journal article on high number of college rejections: College Rejects Record Numbers
This year's college-admissions competition is turning out to be more brutal than ever -- and not just for students who applied to elite universities.
A number of top-tier state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges say they received more applications this year from well-qualified students -- and consequently are turning down a higher percentage of them.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received 20,017 applications, up from 19,736 last year. The state school's acceptance rate fell to 33.3% from 34.1%. At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, 4,624 students applied, up 8%, yet it accepted 1,348, down from 1,395 last year, to prevent overenrollment. Even schools that admit the vast majority of applicants are becoming more selective. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, saw a record 15,836 applicants this year, up from 15,498 the year before; it accepted 73% of them, down from 78% last year.
Many Ivy League universities also drew record numbers of applicants and consequently admitted students at lower rates. The University of Pennsylvania saw applications rise 11% over the last year to a record 22,634, while its acceptance rate fell to 15% from about 17% last year. "The talent of students in the pool was so exceptional that we had difficulty making choices," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the Philadelphia school.
Another New York Times article on the new 2nd tier "Ivy League" schools: Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier "Lehigh University has never been as sought after as Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But this year, awash in applications, it churned out rejection letters and may break more hearts when it comes to its waiting list.
Call them second-tier colleges (a phrase some administrators despise) or call them the new Ivies (this, they can live with). Twenty-five to 40 universities like Lehigh, traditionally perceived as being a notch below the most elite, have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top.
“It’s harder to get into Bowdoin now than it was to get into Princeton when I worked there,” said William M. Shain, who worked at Princeton in the 1970s and is now dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Bowdoin is one of those benefiting from the spillover as the country’s most prestigious colleges turn away nearly 9 out of 10 applicants.
At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said.
Students have generally been quicker to adapt to the new realities than parents have been, many guidance counselors said. "
Wall Street Journal on how schools are checking the accuracy of apps: The Admissions Police
Before mailing out acceptance and rejection letters over the past week, thousands of colleges and graduate schools conducted their usual reviews of test scores, transcripts and essays. But less publicly, admissions officers focused on something else: police databases, plagiarism checks and reports by private-investigators.
There's a new age of vigilance in academia. Spooked by incidents including guidance-counselor fraud in Los Angeles, blatant plagiarism at MIT and campus crime in North Carolina, colleges and graduate schools are shoring up their admissions process. In an era when applicants seek an edge with $500-an-hour "admissions consultants" and online essay-editing services, schools are using their own new methods to vet prospective students. Much like corporations that have been burned by CEO résumé scandals, universities are tapping into the burgeoning background-check industry to verify what's written -- or not -- on applications.
The University of California system, which enrolls more than 30,000 college freshmen each year, now conducts random spot checks, asking about 10% of applicants to verify activities, grades or facts from personal essays. Last year, five Division I athletic programs began using a law firm to conduct background checks on high-school recruits. And this school year, Harvard's undergraduate admissions staff added a former professional background checker. "We look at essays with a certain degree of skepticism," says Harvard College director of admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis. "We're not shy about checking further."
And then there is the joint effort with Newsweek magazine and the Kapplan College Guide. Has an interesting 2006 article about the new 25 Ivy League schools . . . but quite debatable based on who did and did not make this list.
Parents: it is important to let your child guide their own way, but don't leave it all up to them. Get actively involved. Help them learn how to "market" themselves to the prospective schools. Each year more and more kids are applying and so they need whatever edge you can provide them. Do you have other resources or questions? This page was last modified on Sunday, May 30, 2010 | |
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